TheBanyanTree: Letting down the ancestors

[Anita Coia]

My first foray into a vegie garden has been a dismal failure. I'm sure my
Italian grandfather, who was famous for his ability to grow ANYTHING, is
turning in his grave when he gazes down on the sad remnants of my plants. 

 

I bought seedlings late last year, as we were moving into summer, thinking
seedlings would give me a better chance of success.  Actually that was an
after-thought. I was walking through a nursery with Zoe, showing her the
plants, and some kind of madness came over me when I saw the vegie garden
seedlings. I blame the post-birth hormones (still!) for the overwhelming
urge to plant vegetables and eventually harvest them with my daughter to
show her where some of our food comes from. I still remember with great
pleasure picking carrots and tomatoes and broad beans out of our
grandparents' garden and our own garden, which I now realise was planted to
save money in very tight times.

 

Anyway, I planted them into the garden, next to some young conifers (mistake
#1).  On a section of garden we had previously used for vegies, with a
slight slope (mistake #2). And I should have checked optimum planting times
for each of the vegie plants I bought, but I didn't (mistake #3), as I was
concerned the seedlings would dry out in the pots. Or that I would forget
about them and they would be wasted. 

 

So...planting seedlings during drought, next to small trees that suck all
the nutrients out of the soil, not having composted the soil first, on a
slight slope, and planting some of them (e.g. tomatoes) a smidge too early,
really was not "shooting for success". 

 

There was no rain for ages while the plants were young, and when I
hand-watered, it rolled straight off the bone-dry soil.  Very depressing to
see. I didn't make the time to cut shallow hollows in front of the plants to
give them half a chance. I should have mulched with the broken-down compost
from our bins, but I planted everything too close together and couldn't do
it afterwards. And I should have fertilised, but it would have required a
trip to the hardware store, and I never seemed to get time to do it.  The
heat of the sun was diabolical on some days - the ferns in the other corner
of the garden turned up their tips, which fry to a sad brown colour, exactly
as if a child with a magnifying glass was standing over them trying to light
them.

 

The mini-cauliflowers never had a chance. It took me ages to realise that
the little white moths I was pointing out to Zoe while we played in the
backyard were in fact voracious marauding cabbage moths, who ate the plants
down to bare stalks.  The silverbeet, planted at the top of the slope,
suffered mightily from the lack of water and the onslaught of hungry snails
(and let me assure you, coffee grounds don't do much to keep our snails at
bay). The chives grew, but sooooooo slowly.  And the carrots struggled to
push through the soil, so that when I picked them, they were short fat
things and not very sweet, and I just put them back over the soil to rot
into mulch.  The cherry tomatoes are fruiting at the moment, but not
prolifically. They were marginally saved by the raspberry bushes that
protected them from the burning sun during the many very hot days we had
before Christmas. The lettuces were also not too bad, but they didn't last
long, racing to seed from, I assume, the unfriendly heat and dryness kicking
off their survival instincts.

 

The only things that did well were the herbs, which are more or less weeds,
but more useful. And I planted them at the bottom of the slope, so they
received the run-off from my watering.  However the hot sun and lack of
moisture seemed to rush them to seed too.

 

So my conclusion is that I have a lot to learn about growing vegetables, so
I aim to research it a bit more this year. Clearly one of the key aspects is
preparation, and another is having time to tend and care for the garden,
which might mean it's not well suited to a working mum. I might someday also
take a leaf out of my grandfather's book. He came from a village in central
Italy, and brought with him to Australia his method of planting by the moon,
which worked equally well here despite us being suspended upside down.  I
realise now how much I took for granted his olives, his fig trees heavy with
fruit, the huge vegie garden yielding buckets and buckets of produce. He
might not have been able to read well, but boy could he grow stuff!! J

 

Anita